“soft, gentle and low”

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

The time of Lear, a darkness like the piths

Of blackness in the innards of those oaks

Unopened for four hundred years, the myths

He lived in with his monster daughters, hoax

Of Druids and of women and their men,

Is known too well in every age.  We know

The truth about their evil love so when

We meet it on the stage and where we go

About the streets of Christendom, we cringe

Like Lear inside the tempest on the heath.

We know that so-called people want to binge

On power.  We sense their stench and grubby teeth.

  Cordelias and Lears attempt to be

    Still decency despite greed’s scrawling scree.

~ Phillip Whidden